First Annual Earth Day, Union Square, April 22, 1970
Fifty-four years ago this afternoon, classes being over, I trekked two blocks east from Xavier High School along 16th Street to Union Square Park where I’d take the No. 6 subway to the Bronx. To my astonishment, the park was jam-packed with people. Thousands of them, in the middle of the day. It had the vibe of an anti-war demo. It was replicated elsewhere in Manhattan and in many other cities around the country, all too familiar to us today in its size and planning.
“What’s this?,” I muttered. “Earth Day? You gotta be kidding me!”
“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012[1]
I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.
Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you. Continue reading “Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases”
“The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case [abortion], the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks … at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.” Donald Trump, Truth Social, today. (Emphasis added.)
“At the end of the day”? Say, when the sun goes down (as I once heard Bill O’Reilly quip)?
Trump’s context is, of course, the U.S. politics and Constitution, not eschatology. The end of the day (ἡμέρας)of man (ἀνθρωπίνης) (1 Corinthians 4:3), every detail of which having been ordained to come to pass (Ephesians 1:11), will inaugurate the day (ἡμέρας)of Christ (Χριστοῦ) (Philippians 1:6; not the Day of the Lord).
In that day, co-extensive with the manifest Kingdom of God, there will be no exceptions for any species of homicide. The penalty will be death (Acts 5:1-11; the Acts period being a foretaste of the Kingdom[1]). God’s will, not “the people’s,” will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).
The “Boys” with their attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, and Alabama State Militia Guard, 1932.
Ninety-three years ago today, nine Black teenagers, “hoboing” on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were attacked by a mob of white youths who strongly disapproved of their presence on “a white man’s train.” Thrown off it by their intended victims, the hooligans falsely reported to police in Paint Rock, Alabama, that the teenagers has attacked them. After a search of the train, the police rounded up not only the Black youths but also two white women who then falsely accused them of rape. The prosecution of “The Scottsboro Boys,” the first international cause célèbre of the American Civil Rights Movement, afforded an opportunity for the Communist Party to leave its mark, the first of many, on that movement. This complex historical episode eventually became the subject of academic study, and one of the first scholars to study it was my friend and fellow Aptheker research assistant, Hugh Murray. [1]
Jane, Otis, and Mildred Sellers, probably late 1930s
On that very day, March 25, 1931, Otis Q. Sellers turned 30. He was not yet the grey eminence I knew in the 197os, but the young man finally out of his twenties and on his way to becoming the Bible teacher from whom I learned much. About his life and thought I’ve been blogging into existence, for the past six years, a 96,000-word manuscript. (I’m raising funds to publish it as a book, I hope this year.) Two years into the Great Depression, Sellers was in the middle of his stint (1928-1932) as pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, which he left (to shorten a long story brutally) “to do my own studies.” On his milestone birthday, what was transpiring 400 miles south of him was on the mind of few Americans, and his wasn’t one of them. That would soon change.
Title page of “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America: 1638–1871,” Du Bois’s Harvard dissertation, awarded in 1895.
Phil Sinitiere, a scholar specializing in W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), recently brought to my attention that today, Du Bois’s 156th birthday, is commemorated as the Third Annual W. E. B. Du Bois Day at Fisk University. Fisk was Du Bois’s alma mater (1885-1888) before he became the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard College in 1895. The birthday occasioned today’s brief post.
I’m linked to Du Bois through my modest involvement a half-century ago in Aptheker’s preparation of Du Bois’s correspondence and bibliography for publication, which I discussed briefly here. In another post I elaborated upon certain grim facts that no admirer of his efforts to secure civil rights for African Americans should forget.
Willie Du Bois with his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt. (Public domain.)
After graduating from Fisk, Du Bois studied philosophy at the feet of several members of Harvard’s Minervan pantheon, including Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, George Santayana, and William James. James’s mentoring of Du Bois was a major factor in his pioneering of American sociology.[1]
By temperament and education, Du Bois was the furthest thing from “woke”; he had earned a Harvard doctorate when that institution was transmissive rather than subversive of Western Civilization. In the six decades since his passing, unfortunately, the writings of this card-carrying Communist have inspired many of that civilization’s enemies. In the last two decades of his life, his disgust with the West moved him to eulogize Stalin effusively and admire Mao cordially. Should we judge such things less harshly than the inanities of “woke” ideology (which rationalize genocide)? My posts suggest a negative answer.
Herbert Aptheker signs the contract authorizing the sale of W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts, May 27, 1973
Note
[1] “I became a devoted follower of James,” Du Bois wrote, “at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy”; James “guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism.” He recalled being “repeatedly . . . a guest in the home of William James . . . .” Cited in James Campbell, “Du Bois and James,”Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 28:3, Summer 1992, 569-570. Campbell contrasts the younger man’s star-struck recollection with James’s more sober description: “although James was no doubt concerned with Du Bois’s future and respectful and supportive of Du Bois’s work,” Campbell writes, “it is not clear that James offered him any real help to advance any of his projects” (570).
A little over a month ago, I was immersed in a project that now strikes me as an exercise in navel-gazing. It’s one I might salvage, but only if I can recast it in the shadow of the pogrom that Hamas inflicted on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023.
The project in question, set out here, is my attempt to understand what motivated those who responded to injustice (what any ethical person would regard as injustice) in order establish justice (in matters of, say, labor conditions, race relations, war and peace, etc.), but adopted a worldview and a politics through which they either acted unjustly themselves or supported people, ideas, and movements that did.
That is, they joined a Marxist movement in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to protest company violence against striking workers or the lynching of African Americans, but wound up supporting, and rationalizing support of, regimes whose crimes were far worse than those that first offended their moral sensibilities.
It has sadly come home to me that Alan Wald, the prolific historian of such individuals, whose writings I very much enjoy and who came out of the Trotskyist movement in the 1960s and 1970s is, from my perspective, on the wrong side of the Israel-“Palestine” conflict. The rationalization and even glorification of unspeakable terror has left its mark on every major academic institution, including UMichigan, from which Wald retired in 2014 after almost 40 years. From that stance no nuanced dissent is socially permitted. To my knowledge he has expressed none.
I will see if Wald has expressed or will express condemnation of October 7, but his biography gives me no reason to be sanguine about that possibility. I don’t think he’s ever put distance between himself and the genocidal maniacs who “martyr” themselves for “Palestine” (who would incinerate him without a second thought if it suited them). Today’s Israel-negationists, with their “Jews for Palestine” contingent (“Turkeys for Thanksgiving,” anyone?), have given today’s left their sacramental “antiwar movement,” a platform on which to socialize, propagandize, and organize. Continue reading “What a Difference a Pogrom Makes: Thoughts on the Left’s Embrace of Barbarism”
I will evaluate, not the dramatist’s claims, but Bill’s dismissal of them. Bill shows no awareness of, let alone respect for, the well-developed case that has been made for a philosophical position (with which non-philosopher Mamet loosely identified himself in an interview).
David Mamet
That is, I’m interested in whether Bill fairly represented, not Mamet, but the view that Bill, the self-described conservative, excoriates as “absurd.”
I stipulate that I’m ripping out of context (a context available to interested readers who take the link above) these sentences of his:
Conservatives . . . . are not anarchists because they accept the moral legitimacy of the State. Conservatives are law and order types, but there can be no law and order without a coercive state of [sic] apparatus that forces people to do what they are often uninclined to do. Conservatives believe in a strong national defense. They want the nation’s borders to be secure. All of this requires local, state, and Federal government. Conservatives are not libertarians because they understand that culture matters and that not every question is an economic one.
The last implication is, apparently, that for libertarians, either culture doesn’t matter, or every question is an economic one (or both). As someone who read and befriended Murray Rothbard 40 years ago, I never met a libertarian who held either belief. Whom did Bill have in mind?
The conservatives whom I’m sure Bill and I admire have cared a great deal about justice. Thoughtful conservatives, when confronted with argument and evidence that suggests that the way they go about establishing law and order, a strong national defense, and secure borders has offended justice—that is, that the policies they sincerely intended to secure those goods are unjust—don’t retort, “So what!” Rather, they examine the libertarian’s premises to see whether they’re (a) true or false and/or (b) linked validly or not in support of his conclusion. Bill neither did this nor pointed his readers to those who have.
Yes, answers Diana West, in this interview. If she’s right—and I don’t see how we can avoid drawing that conclusion and preparing for the worst—then by posting this I’ve all but sealed my liberty’s doom, for the surveillance state can easily find subjects like me who qualify for the “formal deprogramming” of “cultists” that Hillary recently recommended.
If you don’t yet know who Diana West is, please consider a couple of posts from 2020:
Hard for me to believe, but her eye-opening (and engagingly written) American Betrayal is now ten years old. Events of the past decade conform to the pattern she describes in that book.
“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).
I republish this December 11, 2020 post not only for its intrinsic historical and theoretical interest (not to mention its subject matter’s timeliness), but also its bearing on my current project of understanding the attraction of revolutionary Marxism. (Note his concise exposure of two common non sequiturs, one “racist,” the other “anti-racist.”) Marxists have avoided grappling with Rothbard’s praxeological and natural law approach to history and economics (to their detriment, in my opinion). Unlike Rothbard, it is they who are today’s conservatives: they champion oppressive statist social orders as well as or better than hired “prizefighters for the bourgeoisie” whom their rhetoric holds up to ridicule. Those who, like the present writer, lived through the 1960s, will recognize antecedents of today’s newsmakers.—A.G.F.
Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.
Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.
Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).
Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)
“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher; its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy. Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver, and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).
On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution. [That would be January 6, 2021, which (as I wrote about at the time) predictably provoked a counterrevolutionary reaction that reverberates to this day.—A.G.F.]
—Anthony Flood
The Negro Revolution
Murray N. Rothbard
In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.
DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sits around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.
Revolution, in the first place, is not a single, isolated event, to be looked at as a static phenomenon. It is a dynamic, open-ended process. One of its chief characteristics, indeed, is the rapidity and acceleration of social change. Ordinarily, the tempo of social and political change is slow, meandering, inconsequential: in short, the typical orderly America of the political science textbooks. But, in a revolution, the tempo of change suddenly speeds up enormously; and this means change in all relevant variables: in the ideas governing the revolutionary movement, in its growth and in the character of its leadership, and in its impact on the rest of society.
Another crucial aspect of Revolution is its sudden stress on mass action. In America, social and political action has taken place for a long while in smoke-filled rooms of political parties, in quiet behind-the-scenes talks of lobbyists, Congressmen, and executive officials, and in the sober, drawn-out processes of the courts. Outside of football games, the very concept of mass action has been virtually unknown in the United States. But all this has been changed with the onset, this year, of the Negro Revolution. Continue reading “Rothbard’s anti-statist theory of revolution, 60 years on”
James T. Farrell (1904-1979), ex-Catholic, ex-Trotskyist novelist and social theorist, a quintessential “New York Intellectual” (by way of Chicago).
Immersed as I now am in the world of American Marxist creatives in the ’20s, ’30s, and beyond (e.g., James T. Farrell, his friend George Novack, their rival [my professor] Sidney Hook, et al.), I’m struck by their appeal to philosophical naturalism (materialism) to anchor their work in reality, thereby giving their work ultimate meaning. That’s their touchstone. This presupposition is rarely laid bare and argued for; when it is, its rationale wears its inadequacy on its face. I’ll explore this in future posts.
They all wanted, as I once did, to bring about a more just, more beautiful world, one of peace and prosperity for all, even though they and their revolutionary projects, according to their metaphysics, bore no more significance than the bathroom insect I crushed this morning. As an event, neither its crawling nor my crushing was less significant than, say, Beethoven’s composition of his Ninth Symphony or any performance thereof. When leftists achieve anything they deem success, they crush, not insects, but human beings, by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions.
Created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), however, they know in their hearts that they’re divine intentions, not byproducts of a cosmic explosion, the extrapolation to which their veneration of Received Scientific Opinion drives them and constrains them to honor.
Their symbol-making and -using nature, without which neither science nor art is possible, is just a “lucky accident”; the very effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, the “fit” of number and matter, is admitted to be “unreasonable” on naturalistic terms.
They’d go mad if they believed they were accidents. To inoculate themselves against this cosmic nightmare, they tell themselves stories, including one about how man became a storyteller. These “scientific materialists” project romantic images of themselves in every sentence they dream, utter, or write. In so doing they suppress what they know, wickedly (Romans 1:18).
Before Moses wrote a word of Genesis, God had beheld “every thing that he had made” and said “it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The first esthetic judgment was divine. Human esthetic judgment, if untethered to that primordial truth, may tickle the fancy of its hearers or readers, but it inevitably floats back into in the void from which it emerged—which evacuates it of any noble sentiment it may have borne for a cosmic split-second.
“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012
“The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case [abortion], the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks … at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.” Donald Trump, 
no exceptions for any species of homicide. The penalty will be death (Acts 5:1-11; the Acts period being a foretaste of the Kingdom[1]). God’s will, not “the people’s,” will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).
Yes, answers Diana West, 
